Jean Biarez: His Life and Work - Multiscale Geomechanics: From Soil to Engineering Projects - page 9

contacting sensors for this purpose. During this same period, a longitudinal resonant
column was developed in Boelle's PhD thesis. We should also mention the research
carried out by Jean-Marie Fleureau on the behavior of unsaturated soils.
The FEM, invented in the United States, was introduced in France for
application to soil mechanics by Biarez and was then further developed by Gilbert
Touze, Marie-Armelle Sens, Marc Boulon and Denis Aubry. Aubry used this
computation method on the Mont Cenis dam project and supervised the
development of the GEFDYN software. The importation of the FEM was
undoubtedly one of the most visionary acts of his career, clearly confirmed by the
subsequent progress made in numerical computation.
On many construction sites, either with the CNR ( Compagnie nationale du
Rhône ) or at Dibamba in Cameroon with Patrick Berthelot, Biarez found the
importance of correlations between parameters. Based on the method of solving
continuum mechanics problems, he came up with a system of parameter
connections, which Jean-Louis Favre found useful in his work on reducing
uncertainty factors. Although this line of research was not well appreciated at the
beginning, it subsequently gained followers in Nancy, Clermont-Ferrand, Bordeaux,
and eventually led to construction reliability. This subject is still being investigated
at ECP by Fernando Lopez-Caballero and Didier Clouteau, who applied the
approach to seismic problems involving soil−structure interaction s.
With Pierre Sirieys, Pierre Antoine and Chahrohk Azimi, Biarez found how to
apply rock mechanics, geology and geophysics to in situ geotechnics. In Grenoble
he initiated a not-for-profit organization called the Association pour le
développement de la recherche sur les glissements de terrain , with his former
students François Keime, Pierre Desvarreux, and Chahrohk Azimi for research into
landslides. No one who was present on that afternoon in Aussois at the first GRECO
( Groupement de Recherches Coordonnées) Géomatériaux conference in 1986 will
forget his impassioned remarks about the stability of a fractured face rock.
1.4. Research and teaching
We have just seen the main areas of research in Biarez's career, but who was the
man behind the work? To quote some of his former students, Biarez was a
“midwife”, someone who delivered new ideas and then left these ideas for his
students to ponder. As a teacher he gave his students great liberty, which was not
necessarily appreciated by all.
The metaphor of a “midwife” is an ancient one. Socrates, Plato's teacher and the
son of a midwife, described teaching as midwifery, as reasoning ideas out of the